Actually, I've been saying that even models from 2+ years ago were extremely good, but you needed to "hold them right" to get good results, else you might cut yourself on the sharp edges of the "jagged frontier" (https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=64700) Unfortunately, this often necessitated you to adapt yourself to the tool, which is a big change -- unfeasible for most people and companies.
I would say the underlying principle was ensuring a tight, highly relevant context (e.g. choose the "right" task size and load only the relevant files or even code snippets, not the whole codebase; more manual work upfront, but almost guaranteed one-shot results.)
With newer models the sharper edges have largely disappeared, so you can hold them pretty much any which way and still get very good results. I'm not sure how much of this is from the improvements in the model itself vs the additional context it gets from the agentic scaffolding.
I still maintain that we need to adapt ourselves to this new paradigm to fully leverage AI-assisted coding, and the future of coding will be pretty strange compared to what we're used to. As an example, see Gas Town: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
FWIW, Gas Town is strange because Steve is strange (in a good way).
It's just the same agent swarm orchestration that most agent frameworks are using, but with quirky marketing. All of that is just based on the SDLC [PM/Architect -> engineer planning group -> engineer -> review -> qa/evaluation] loop most people here should be familiar with. So actually pretty banal, which is probably part of the reason Steve decided to be zany.
Ah, gotcha, I am still working through the article, but its detailed focus on all the moving parts under the covers is making it hard to grok the high-level workflow.
Each failed prediction should lower our confidence in the next "it's finally useful!" claim. But this inductive reasoning breaks down at genuine inflection points.
I agree with your framing that measuring should NOT be separated from political issues, but each can be made clear separately (framing it as "training the tools of the oppressor" seems to conflate measuring tool usefulness with politics).
> How is it useful to you that these companies are so valuation hungry that they are moving money into this technology in such a way that people are fearful it could cripple the entire global economy?
The creation of entire new classes of profession has always been the result of technological breakthroughs. The automobile did not cripple the economy, even as it ended the buggy-whip barons.
> How is it useful to you that this tech is so power hungry that environmental externalities are being further accelerated while regular people's utility costs are raising to cover the increased demand(whether they use the tech to "code" or "manifest art")?
There will be advantages to lower-power computing, and lower-cost electricity. Implement carbon taxes and AI companies will follow the market incentive to install their datacentres in places where sustainable power is available for cheap. We'll see China soaring to new heights with their massive solar investment, and America will eventually figure out they have to catch up and cannot do so with coal and gas.
> How is it useful to you that this tech is so compute hungry that they are seemingly ending the industry of personal compute to feed this tech's demand?
Temporary problem, the demand for personal computing is not going to die in five years, and meanwhile the lucrative markets for producing this equipment will result in many new factories, increasing capacity and eventually lowering prices again. In the meantime, many pundits are suggesting that this may thankfully begin the end of the Electron App Era where a fuckin' chat client thinks it deserves 1GB of RAM.
Consider this: why are we using Electron and needing 32GB of RAM on a desktop? Because web developers only knew how to use Javascript and couldn't write a proper desktop app. With AI, desktop frameworks can have a resurgence; why shouldn't I use Go or Rust and write a native app on all platforms now that the cost of doing so is decreasing and the number of people empowered to work with it is increasing? I wrote a nice multithreaded fractal renderer in Rust the other day; I don't know how to multithread, write Rust, and probably can't iterate complex numbers correctly on paper anymore....
> How is it useful to you that this tech is so water hungry that it is emptying drinking water acquifers?
This is only a problem in places that have poor water policy, e.g. California (who can all thank the gods that their reservoirs are all now very full from the recent rain). This problem predates datacenters and needs to be solved - for instance, by federalizing and closing down the so-called Wonderful Company and anyone else who uses underhanded tactics to buy up water rights to grow crops that shouldn't be grown there.
Come and run your datacenters up in the cold North, you won't even need evaporative cooling for them, just blow a ton of fresh air in....
> How is it useful to you that this tech is being used to manufacture consent?
Now you've actually got an argument, and I am on your side on this one.
> If at any point any of these releases were "genuine inflection points" it would be unnecessary to proselytize such. It would be self evident. Much like rain.
Agreed.
Now, I suggest reading through all of this to note that I am not a fan of tech bros, that I do want this to be a bubble. Then also note what else I'm saying despite all that.
To me, it is self-evident. The various projects I have created by simply asking for them, are so. I have looked at the source code they produce, and how this has changed over time: Last year I was describing them as "junior" coders, by which I meant "fresh hire"; now, even with the same title, I would say "someone who is just about to stop being a junior".
> "The oppressed need to acknowledge that their oppression is useful to their oppressors."
The capacity for AI to oppress you is in direct relation to its economic value.
> How is it useful to you that this tech is so power hungry that environmental externalities are being further accelerated while regular people's utility costs are raising to cover the increased demand(whether they use the tech to "code" or "manifest art")?
The power hunger is in direct proportion to the demand. Someone burning USD 20 to get Claude Code tokens has consumed approximately USD 10 of electricity in that period, with the other USD 10 having been spread between repaying the model training cost and the server construction cost.
The reason they're willing to spend USD 20 is to save at least US 20 worth of dev time. This was already the case with the initial version of ChatGPT pro back in the day, when it could justify that by saving 23 dev minutes per month. There's around a million developers in the USA, just that group increasing electricity spending by USD 10/month will put a massive dent on the USA's power grid.
Gets worse though. Based on my experience, using Claude Code optimally, when you spend USD 20 you get at least 10 junior sprints' worth of output. Hiring a junior for 10 sprints is, what, USD 30,000? The bound here is "are you able to get value from having hired 1,500 juniors for the price of one?"
One can of course also waste those tokens. Both because nobody needs slop, and because most people can't manage one junior never mind 1500 of them.
However, if the economy collectively answers "yes", then the environmental externalities expand until you can't afford to keep your fridge cold or your lights on.
This is one of the failure modes of the technological singularity that people like me have been forewarning about for years, even when there's no alignment issues within the models themselves. Which there are, because Musk's one went and called itself Mecha Hitler, while being so sycophantic about Musk himself that it called him the best at everything even when the thing was "drinking piss", which would be extremely funny if he wasn't selling this to the US military.
> How is it useful to you that this tech is so compute hungry that they are seemingly ending the industry of personal compute to feed this tech's demand?
This will pass. Either this is a bubble, it pops, the manufacturers return to their roots; or it isn't because it works as advertised, which means it leads to much higher growth rates, and we (us, personally, you and me) get personal McKendree cylinders each with more compute than currently exists… or we get turned into the raw materials for those cylinders.
I assume the former. But I say that as one who wants it to be the former.
> How is it useful to you that this tech is so water hungry that it is emptying drinking water acquifers?
Is it what's emptying drinking water acquifers?
The combined water usage of all data centers in Arizona. All of them. Together. Which is over 100 DCs. All of them combined use about double what Tesla was expecting from just the Brandenburg Gigafactory to use before Musk decided to burn his reputation with EV consumers and Europeans for political point scoring.
> How is it useful to you that this tech is being used to manufacture consent?
This is one of the objectively bad things, though it's hard to say if this is more or less competent at this than all the other stuff we had three years ago, given the observed issues with the algorithmic feeds.
The hype curve is a problem, but it's difficult to prevent. I myself have never made such a prediction. Though it now seems that the money and effort to create working coding tools is near an inflection point.
"It would be self evident." History shows the opposite at inflection points. The "self evident" stage typically comes much later.
It's a little weird how defensive people are about these tools. Did everyone really think being able to import a few npm packages, string together a few APIs, and run npx create-react-app was something a large number of people could do forever?
The vast majority of coders in employment barely write anything more complex than basic CRUD apps. These jobs were always going to be automated or abstracted away sooner or later.
Every profession changes. Saying that these new tools are useless or won't impact you/xyz devs is just ignoring a repeated historical pattern
It's employing so may people who specialize in Salesforce configuration that every year San Francisco collapses under the weight of 50,000+ of them attending Dreamforce.
And it's actually kind of amazing, because a lot of people who earn six figures programming Salesforce came to it from a non-traditional software engineering background.
I think perhaps for some folks we're looking at their first professional paradigm shift. If you're a bit older, you've seen (smaller versions of) the same thing happening before as e.g. the Internet gained traction, Web2.0, ecommerce, crypto, etc. and have seen your past skillset become useless as now it can be accomplished for only $10/mo/user.... either you pivot and move on somehow, or you become a curmudgeon. Truly, the latter is optional, and at any point when you find yourself doing that you wish to stop and just embrace the new thing, you're still more than welcome to do so. AI is only going to get EASIER to get involved with, not harder.
And by the same token (ha) for some folks we're looking at their first hype wave. If you're a bit older, you've seen similar things like 4GLs and visual programming languages and blockchain and expert systems. They each left their mark on our profession but most of their promises were unfounded and ultimately unrealized.
Lol. In a few years when the world is awash in AI-generated slop [1] my "past skills" will not only be relevant, they will be actively sought after.
[1] Like the recent "Gas Town" and "Beads" that people keep mentioning in the comments that require extensive scripts/human intervention to purge from the system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46510121
Agreed, it always seemed a little crazy that you could make wild amounts of money to just write software. I think the music is finally stopping and we'll all have to go back to actually knowing how to do something useful.
> The vast majority of coders in employment barely write anything more complex than basic CRUD apps. These jobs were always going to be automated or abstracted away sooner or later.
My experience has been negative progress in this field. On iOS, UIKit in Interface Builder is an order of magnitude faster to write and to debug, with less weird edge cases, than SwiftUI was last summer. I say last summer because I've been less and less interested in iOS the more I learn about liquid glass, even ignoring the whole "aaaaaaa" factor of "has AI made front end irrelevant anyway?" and "can someone please suggest something the AI really can't do so I can get a job in that?"
The 80s TUI frameworks are still not beaten in developer productivity buy GUI or web frameworks. They have been beaten by GUIs in usability, but then the GUIs reverted into a worse option.
Too bad they were mostly proprietary and won't even run in modern hardware.
Democratizing coding so regular people can get the most out of computers is the opposite of oppression. You are mistaking your interests for societies interests.
It's the same with artists who are now pissed that regular people can manifest their artistic ideas without needing to go through an artist or spend years studying the craft. The artists are calling the AI companies oppressors because they are breaking the artist's stranglehold on the market.
It's incredibly ironic how socializing what was a privatized ability has otherwise "socialist" people completely losing their shit. Just the mask of pure virtue slipping...
On what planet is concentrating an increasingly high amount of the output of this whole industry on a small handful of megacorps “democratising” anything?
Software development was already one of the most democratised professions on earth. With any old dirt cheap used computer, an internet connection, and enough drive and curiosity you could self-train yourself into a role that could quickly become a high paying job. While they certainly helped, you never needed any formal education or expensive qualifications to excel in this field. How is this better?
I used claude code to set up a bunch of basic tools my wife was using in her daily work. Things like custom pomodoro timers, task managers, todo notes.
She used to log into 3 different websites. Now she just opens localhost:3000 and has all of them on the same page. No emails shared with anyone. All data stored locally.
I could have done this earlier but the time commitment with Claude Code now was writing a spec in 5-minutes and pressing approve a few times vs half a day.
I count this as an absolute win. No privacy breaches, no data sharing.
> The artists are calling the AI companies oppressors because they are breaking the artist's stranglehold on the market.
Tt's because these companies profit from all the existing art without compensating the artists. Even worse, they are now putting the very people out of a job who (unwittingly) helped to create these tools in the first place. Not to mention how hurtful it must be for artists seeing their personal style imitated by a machine without their consent.
I totally see how it can empower regular people, but it also empowers the megacorps and bad actors. The jury is still out on whether AI is providing a net positive to society. Until then, let's not ignore the injustice and harm that went into creating these tools and the potential and real dangers that come with it.
When you imagine my position, "I hate these companies for democratizing code/art", then debate that it is called a strawman logical fallacy.
Ascribing the goals of "democratize code/art" onto these companies and their products is called delusion.
I am sure the 3 letter agency directors on these company boards are thrilled you think they left their lifelong careers solely to finally realize their dream to allow you to code and "manifest your artistic ideas".
> If I am unable to convince you to stop meticulously training the tools of the oppressor (for a fee!) then I just ask you do so quietly.
I'm kind of fascinated by how AI has become such a culture war topic with hyperbole like "tools of the oppressor"
It's equally fascinating how little these comments understand about how LLMs work. Using an LLM for inference (what you do when you use Claude Code) does not train the LLM. It does not learn from your code and integrate it into the model while you use it for inference. I know that breaks the "training the tools of the oppressor" narrative which is probably why it's always ignored. If not ignored, the next step is to decry that the LLM companies are lying and are stealing everyone's code despite saying they don't.
The prompts and responses are used as training data. Even if your provider allows you to opt out they are still tracking your usage telemetry and using that to gauge performance. If you don’t own the storage and compute then you are training the tools which will be used to oppress you.
> The prompts and responses are used as training data.
They show a clear pop-up where you choose your setting about whether or not to allow data to be used for training. If you don't choose to share it, it's not used.
I mean I guess if someone blindly clicks through everything and clicks "Accept" without clicking the very obvious slider to turn it off, they could be caught off guard.
Assuming everyone who uses Claude is training their LLMs is just wrong, though.
Telemetry data isn't going to extract your codebase.
I find it hard to believe there are people who know these companies stole the entire creative output of humanity and egregiously continually scrape the internet are, for some reason, ignoring the data you voluntarily give them.
> I know that breaks the "training the tools of the oppressor" narrative
"Narrative"? This is just reality. In their own words:
> The awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI – each with a $200M ceiling – will enable the Department to leverage the technology and talent of U.S. frontier AI companies to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas. Establishing these partnerships will broaden DoD use of and experience in frontier AI capabilities and increase the ability of these companies to understand and address critical national security needs with the most advanced AI capabilities U.S. industry has to offer. The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries [0]
Is 'warfighting adversaries' some convoluted code for allowing Aurornis to 'see a 1337x in productivity'?
Or perhaps you are a wealthy westerner of a racial and sexual majority and as such have felt little by way of oppression by this tech?
In such a case I would encourage you to develop empathy, or at least sympathy.
> Using an LLM for inference .. does not train the LLM.
In their own words:
> One of the most useful and promising features of AI models is that they can improve over time. We continuously improve our models through research breakthroughs as well as exposure to real-world problems and data. When you share your content with us, it helps our models become more accurate and better at solving your specific problems and it also helps improve their general capabilities and safety. We do not use your content to market our services or create advertising profiles of you—we use it to make our models more helpful. ChatGPT, for instance, improves by further training on the conversations people have with it, unless you opt out.
> Is 'warfighting adversaries' some convoluted code for allowing Aurornis to 'see a 1337x in productivity'?
Much as I despair at the current developments in the USA, and I say this as a sexual minority and a European, this is not "tools of the oppressor" in their own words.
Trump is extremely blunt about who he wants to oppress. So is Musk.
"Support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries" is not blunt, it is the minimum baseline for any nation with assets anyone else might want to annex, which is basically anywhere except Nauru, North Sentinel Island, and Bir Tawil.
Who is the parent oppressing? Making a comment and companies looking to automate labor are a little bit different. One might disagree that automation is oppressive or whatever goals the major tech CEOs have in developing AIs (surveillance, influencing politics, increasing wealth gap), but certainly commenting that they are oppressive is not the same thing.
Actually, I've been saying that even models from 2+ years ago were extremely good, but you needed to "hold them right" to get good results, else you might cut yourself on the sharp edges of the "jagged frontier" (https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=64700) Unfortunately, this often necessitated you to adapt yourself to the tool, which is a big change -- unfeasible for most people and companies.
I would say the underlying principle was ensuring a tight, highly relevant context (e.g. choose the "right" task size and load only the relevant files or even code snippets, not the whole codebase; more manual work upfront, but almost guaranteed one-shot results.)
With newer models the sharper edges have largely disappeared, so you can hold them pretty much any which way and still get very good results. I'm not sure how much of this is from the improvements in the model itself vs the additional context it gets from the agentic scaffolding.
I still maintain that we need to adapt ourselves to this new paradigm to fully leverage AI-assisted coding, and the future of coding will be pretty strange compared to what we're used to. As an example, see Gas Town: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...
FWIW, Gas Town is strange because Steve is strange (in a good way).
It's just the same agent swarm orchestration that most agent frameworks are using, but with quirky marketing. All of that is just based on the SDLC [PM/Architect -> engineer planning group -> engineer -> review -> qa/evaluation] loop most people here should be familiar with. So actually pretty banal, which is probably part of the reason Steve decided to be zany.
Ah, gotcha, I am still working through the article, but its detailed focus on all the moving parts under the covers is making it hard to grok the high-level workflow.
Each failed prediction should lower our confidence in the next "it's finally useful!" claim. But this inductive reasoning breaks down at genuine inflection points.
I agree with your framing that measuring should NOT be separated from political issues, but each can be made clear separately (framing it as "training the tools of the oppressor" seems to conflate measuring tool usefulness with politics).
[flagged]
> How is it useful to you that these companies are so valuation hungry that they are moving money into this technology in such a way that people are fearful it could cripple the entire global economy?
The creation of entire new classes of profession has always been the result of technological breakthroughs. The automobile did not cripple the economy, even as it ended the buggy-whip barons.
> How is it useful to you that this tech is so power hungry that environmental externalities are being further accelerated while regular people's utility costs are raising to cover the increased demand(whether they use the tech to "code" or "manifest art")?
There will be advantages to lower-power computing, and lower-cost electricity. Implement carbon taxes and AI companies will follow the market incentive to install their datacentres in places where sustainable power is available for cheap. We'll see China soaring to new heights with their massive solar investment, and America will eventually figure out they have to catch up and cannot do so with coal and gas.
> How is it useful to you that this tech is so compute hungry that they are seemingly ending the industry of personal compute to feed this tech's demand?
Temporary problem, the demand for personal computing is not going to die in five years, and meanwhile the lucrative markets for producing this equipment will result in many new factories, increasing capacity and eventually lowering prices again. In the meantime, many pundits are suggesting that this may thankfully begin the end of the Electron App Era where a fuckin' chat client thinks it deserves 1GB of RAM.
Consider this: why are we using Electron and needing 32GB of RAM on a desktop? Because web developers only knew how to use Javascript and couldn't write a proper desktop app. With AI, desktop frameworks can have a resurgence; why shouldn't I use Go or Rust and write a native app on all platforms now that the cost of doing so is decreasing and the number of people empowered to work with it is increasing? I wrote a nice multithreaded fractal renderer in Rust the other day; I don't know how to multithread, write Rust, and probably can't iterate complex numbers correctly on paper anymore....
> How is it useful to you that this tech is so water hungry that it is emptying drinking water acquifers?
This is only a problem in places that have poor water policy, e.g. California (who can all thank the gods that their reservoirs are all now very full from the recent rain). This problem predates datacenters and needs to be solved - for instance, by federalizing and closing down the so-called Wonderful Company and anyone else who uses underhanded tactics to buy up water rights to grow crops that shouldn't be grown there.
Come and run your datacenters up in the cold North, you won't even need evaporative cooling for them, just blow a ton of fresh air in....
> How is it useful to you that this tech is being used to manufacture consent?
Now you've actually got an argument, and I am on your side on this one.
1 reply →
> If at any point any of these releases were "genuine inflection points" it would be unnecessary to proselytize such. It would be self evident. Much like rain.
Agreed.
Now, I suggest reading through all of this to note that I am not a fan of tech bros, that I do want this to be a bubble. Then also note what else I'm saying despite all that.
To me, it is self-evident. The various projects I have created by simply asking for them, are so. I have looked at the source code they produce, and how this has changed over time: Last year I was describing them as "junior" coders, by which I meant "fresh hire"; now, even with the same title, I would say "someone who is just about to stop being a junior".
> "The oppressed need to acknowledge that their oppression is useful to their oppressors."
The capacity for AI to oppress you is in direct relation to its economic value.
> How is it useful to you that this tech is so power hungry that environmental externalities are being further accelerated while regular people's utility costs are raising to cover the increased demand(whether they use the tech to "code" or "manifest art")?
The power hunger is in direct proportion to the demand. Someone burning USD 20 to get Claude Code tokens has consumed approximately USD 10 of electricity in that period, with the other USD 10 having been spread between repaying the model training cost and the server construction cost.
The reason they're willing to spend USD 20 is to save at least US 20 worth of dev time. This was already the case with the initial version of ChatGPT pro back in the day, when it could justify that by saving 23 dev minutes per month. There's around a million developers in the USA, just that group increasing electricity spending by USD 10/month will put a massive dent on the USA's power grid.
Gets worse though. Based on my experience, using Claude Code optimally, when you spend USD 20 you get at least 10 junior sprints' worth of output. Hiring a junior for 10 sprints is, what, USD 30,000? The bound here is "are you able to get value from having hired 1,500 juniors for the price of one?"
One can of course also waste those tokens. Both because nobody needs slop, and because most people can't manage one junior never mind 1500 of them.
However, if the economy collectively answers "yes", then the environmental externalities expand until you can't afford to keep your fridge cold or your lights on.
This is one of the failure modes of the technological singularity that people like me have been forewarning about for years, even when there's no alignment issues within the models themselves. Which there are, because Musk's one went and called itself Mecha Hitler, while being so sycophantic about Musk himself that it called him the best at everything even when the thing was "drinking piss", which would be extremely funny if he wasn't selling this to the US military.
> How is it useful to you that this tech is so compute hungry that they are seemingly ending the industry of personal compute to feed this tech's demand?
This will pass. Either this is a bubble, it pops, the manufacturers return to their roots; or it isn't because it works as advertised, which means it leads to much higher growth rates, and we (us, personally, you and me) get personal McKendree cylinders each with more compute than currently exists… or we get turned into the raw materials for those cylinders.
I assume the former. But I say that as one who wants it to be the former.
> How is it useful to you that this tech is so water hungry that it is emptying drinking water acquifers?
Is it what's emptying drinking water acquifers?
The combined water usage of all data centers in Arizona. All of them. Together. Which is over 100 DCs. All of them combined use about double what Tesla was expecting from just the Brandenburg Gigafactory to use before Musk decided to burn his reputation with EV consumers and Europeans for political point scoring.
> How is it useful to you that this tech is being used to manufacture consent?
This is one of the objectively bad things, though it's hard to say if this is more or less competent at this than all the other stuff we had three years ago, given the observed issues with the algorithmic feeds.
3 replies →
The hype curve is a problem, but it's difficult to prevent. I myself have never made such a prediction. Though it now seems that the money and effort to create working coding tools is near an inflection point.
"It would be self evident." History shows the opposite at inflection points. The "self evident" stage typically comes much later.
It's a little weird how defensive people are about these tools. Did everyone really think being able to import a few npm packages, string together a few APIs, and run npx create-react-app was something a large number of people could do forever?
The vast majority of coders in employment barely write anything more complex than basic CRUD apps. These jobs were always going to be automated or abstracted away sooner or later.
Every profession changes. Saying that these new tools are useless or won't impact you/xyz devs is just ignoring a repeated historical pattern
They made the "abstracted away the CRUD app", it's called Salesforce. Hows that going?
It's employing so may people who specialize in Salesforce configuration that every year San Francisco collapses under the weight of 50,000+ of them attending Dreamforce.
And it's actually kind of amazing, because a lot of people who earn six figures programming Salesforce came to it from a non-traditional software engineering background.
I think perhaps for some folks we're looking at their first professional paradigm shift. If you're a bit older, you've seen (smaller versions of) the same thing happening before as e.g. the Internet gained traction, Web2.0, ecommerce, crypto, etc. and have seen your past skillset become useless as now it can be accomplished for only $10/mo/user.... either you pivot and move on somehow, or you become a curmudgeon. Truly, the latter is optional, and at any point when you find yourself doing that you wish to stop and just embrace the new thing, you're still more than welcome to do so. AI is only going to get EASIER to get involved with, not harder.
And by the same token (ha) for some folks we're looking at their first hype wave. If you're a bit older, you've seen similar things like 4GLs and visual programming languages and blockchain and expert systems. They each left their mark on our profession but most of their promises were unfounded and ultimately unrealized.
1 reply →
Lol. In a few years when the world is awash in AI-generated slop [1] my "past skills" will not only be relevant, they will be actively sought after.
[1] Like the recent "Gas Town" and "Beads" that people keep mentioning in the comments that require extensive scripts/human intervention to purge from the system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46510121
1 reply →
Agreed, it always seemed a little crazy that you could make wild amounts of money to just write software. I think the music is finally stopping and we'll all have to go back to actually knowing how to do something useful.
> The vast majority of coders in employment barely write anything more complex than basic CRUD apps. These jobs were always going to be automated or abstracted away sooner or later.
My experience has been negative progress in this field. On iOS, UIKit in Interface Builder is an order of magnitude faster to write and to debug, with less weird edge cases, than SwiftUI was last summer. I say last summer because I've been less and less interested in iOS the more I learn about liquid glass, even ignoring the whole "aaaaaaa" factor of "has AI made front end irrelevant anyway?" and "can someone please suggest something the AI really can't do so I can get a job in that?"
The 80s TUI frameworks are still not beaten in developer productivity buy GUI or web frameworks. They have been beaten by GUIs in usability, but then the GUIs reverted into a worse option.
Too bad they were mostly proprietary and won't even run in modern hardware.
You're free to not open these threads, you know!
Democratizing coding so regular people can get the most out of computers is the opposite of oppression. You are mistaking your interests for societies interests.
It's the same with artists who are now pissed that regular people can manifest their artistic ideas without needing to go through an artist or spend years studying the craft. The artists are calling the AI companies oppressors because they are breaking the artist's stranglehold on the market.
It's incredibly ironic how socializing what was a privatized ability has otherwise "socialist" people completely losing their shit. Just the mask of pure virtue slipping...
On what planet is concentrating an increasingly high amount of the output of this whole industry on a small handful of megacorps “democratising” anything?
Software development was already one of the most democratised professions on earth. With any old dirt cheap used computer, an internet connection, and enough drive and curiosity you could self-train yourself into a role that could quickly become a high paying job. While they certainly helped, you never needed any formal education or expensive qualifications to excel in this field. How is this better?
Open/local models are available.
Maybe not as good, but they can certainly do far far more than what was available a few years ago.
2 replies →
It's better because now you can automate something tedious in your life with a computer without having to first climb a six month learning curve.
2 replies →
I used claude code to set up a bunch of basic tools my wife was using in her daily work. Things like custom pomodoro timers, task managers, todo notes.
She used to log into 3 different websites. Now she just opens localhost:3000 and has all of them on the same page. No emails shared with anyone. All data stored locally.
I could have done this earlier but the time commitment with Claude Code now was writing a spec in 5-minutes and pressing approve a few times vs half a day.
I count this as an absolute win. No privacy breaches, no data sharing.
> The artists are calling the AI companies oppressors because they are breaking the artist's stranglehold on the market.
Tt's because these companies profit from all the existing art without compensating the artists. Even worse, they are now putting the very people out of a job who (unwittingly) helped to create these tools in the first place. Not to mention how hurtful it must be for artists seeing their personal style imitated by a machine without their consent.
I totally see how it can empower regular people, but it also empowers the megacorps and bad actors. The jury is still out on whether AI is providing a net positive to society. Until then, let's not ignore the injustice and harm that went into creating these tools and the potential and real dangers that come with it.
When you imagine my position, "I hate these companies for democratizing code/art", then debate that it is called a strawman logical fallacy.
Ascribing the goals of "democratize code/art" onto these companies and their products is called delusion.
I am sure the 3 letter agency directors on these company boards are thrilled you think they left their lifelong careers solely to finally realize their dream to allow you to code and "manifest your artistic ideas".
Again, open models exist. These companies don't have a monopoly on the tech and they know it.
So maybe celebrate open/private/local models for empowering people rather than selfishly complain about it?
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But people are not creating anything. They are just asking a computer to remix what other people created.
It's incredibly ironic how blatant theft has left otherwise capitalistic people so enthusiastic.
> If I am unable to convince you to stop meticulously training the tools of the oppressor (for a fee!) then I just ask you do so quietly.
I'm kind of fascinated by how AI has become such a culture war topic with hyperbole like "tools of the oppressor"
It's equally fascinating how little these comments understand about how LLMs work. Using an LLM for inference (what you do when you use Claude Code) does not train the LLM. It does not learn from your code and integrate it into the model while you use it for inference. I know that breaks the "training the tools of the oppressor" narrative which is probably why it's always ignored. If not ignored, the next step is to decry that the LLM companies are lying and are stealing everyone's code despite saying they don't.
We are not talking about inference.
The prompts and responses are used as training data. Even if your provider allows you to opt out they are still tracking your usage telemetry and using that to gauge performance. If you don’t own the storage and compute then you are training the tools which will be used to oppress you.
Incredibly naive comment.
> The prompts and responses are used as training data.
They show a clear pop-up where you choose your setting about whether or not to allow data to be used for training. If you don't choose to share it, it's not used.
I mean I guess if someone blindly clicks through everything and clicks "Accept" without clicking the very obvious slider to turn it off, they could be caught off guard.
Assuming everyone who uses Claude is training their LLMs is just wrong, though.
Telemetry data isn't going to extract your codebase.
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I understand how these LLMs work.
I find it hard to believe there are people who know these companies stole the entire creative output of humanity and egregiously continually scrape the internet are, for some reason, ignoring the data you voluntarily give them.
> I know that breaks the "training the tools of the oppressor" narrative
"Narrative"? This is just reality. In their own words:
> The awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI – each with a $200M ceiling – will enable the Department to leverage the technology and talent of U.S. frontier AI companies to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas. Establishing these partnerships will broaden DoD use of and experience in frontier AI capabilities and increase the ability of these companies to understand and address critical national security needs with the most advanced AI capabilities U.S. industry has to offer. The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries [0]
Is 'warfighting adversaries' some convoluted code for allowing Aurornis to 'see a 1337x in productivity'?
Or perhaps you are a wealthy westerner of a racial and sexual majority and as such have felt little by way of oppression by this tech?
In such a case I would encourage you to develop empathy, or at least sympathy.
> Using an LLM for inference .. does not train the LLM.
In their own words:
> One of the most useful and promising features of AI models is that they can improve over time. We continuously improve our models through research breakthroughs as well as exposure to real-world problems and data. When you share your content with us, it helps our models become more accurate and better at solving your specific problems and it also helps improve their general capabilities and safety. We do not use your content to market our services or create advertising profiles of you—we use it to make our models more helpful. ChatGPT, for instance, improves by further training on the conversations people have with it, unless you opt out.
[0] https://www.ai.mil/latest/news-press/pr-view/article/4242822...
[1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5722486-how-your-data-is...
> Is 'warfighting adversaries' some convoluted code for allowing Aurornis to 'see a 1337x in productivity'?
Much as I despair at the current developments in the USA, and I say this as a sexual minority and a European, this is not "tools of the oppressor" in their own words.
Trump is extremely blunt about who he wants to oppress. So is Musk.
"Support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries" is not blunt, it is the minimum baseline for any nation with assets anyone else might want to annex, which is basically anywhere except Nauru, North Sentinel Island, and Bir Tawil.
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Frankly, in this comment thread you appear to be the oppressor.
Who is the parent oppressing? Making a comment and companies looking to automate labor are a little bit different. One might disagree that automation is oppressive or whatever goals the major tech CEOs have in developing AIs (surveillance, influencing politics, increasing wealth gap), but certainly commenting that they are oppressive is not the same thing.
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